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Denying that we are in a simulation seems a bit like pre-Galileo conventional wisdom claiming that the Earth was the center of the universe. What is so special about this universe of ours, besides the fact that we're in it?

If a well-financed team of humans could create a simulated "universe" in a computer with sufficient complexity that evolved beings in the simulation exhibit "intelligent" characteristics, then that seems like a good bet that someone could have done that for us. It actually seems much more plausible than the other alternatives. Wait, what are the other alternatives again?

I couldn't quite believe he was aiming us right into the fire. He sure
didn't look suicidal, but whatever he had in mind was beyond me.
At last he grabbed the mutated gearshift. I managed to keep one eye
on his hands as the wildfire bore down on us. Now we'd see something.
The conical hood omament suddenly pronged forward, stretching out
through a widening hole until it looked like a robot anteater snout.
Then it shot out a brilliant sky-blue stream of some glowing, crackling
liquid unlike anything I'd ever seen, all over the onrushing flames.

There was a lot more of it firing out from under us through that
nozzle than we could possibly have room for in any concealed tanks.
"Where's it all coming from?"

"We draw it in as needed, and crush-cool it on the spot. No one misses
it; there's at least ten to the ninety-fourth watt-seconds per cubiccentimeter, everywhere in space, including space full of matter. The primary
carrier wave of the physical universe is around sixty octaves
higher than an electron's diameter." He switched hands, kept blasting
away and pointed at a spot on the spectrum chart in the upper zone
unknown to me. "The higher the frequency, the greater the energy
density. Establish resonance with space-juice itself and you can obtain
virtually unlimited power."

The sizzling, metallic turquoise liquid was spreading out incredibly
fast wherever it hit, engulfing the flames in big round patches. It
sounded like a cross between distant artillery and huge sails flapping in
a gale as it rolled out over the blaze. The stuff went from shiny to
blurry, and expanded into thick mats of blue-white fog, as if to cool and
soothe whatever might survive of the forest.

We tilted around the western rim of the burned area, mopping up
several hot spots missed by the main volley. The pulses of juice didn't
follow exactly smooth trajectories but seemed to crackle slightly as if
along lightning discharge paths.

The otter didn't appear to be even remotely scared by all this. He just
stood resting a paw against my seat, watching and making chortling
noises.

I found my voice again, "Is this another one of those suppressed
inventions?"

"Not exactly; this one really was a bit ahead of its time. Liquidelectricity doesn't have many useful applications until you make available
a virtually unlimited electron supply. The basic idea was developed by
a guy named Richard Diggs back in the late seventies, though he didn't
foresee this embodiment at the time."

Apart from the psycho-acoustic simulation, BlueBeat also appeared to be making the claim that because it embedded image files in the music downloads, they somehow became totally new "audio-visual works." Indeed, BlueBeat claimed to own the copyright on these works.

StackOverflow is really impressive, and useful. I find myself adding "site:stackoverflow.com" to google queries when I'm troubleshooting some code problem. If there's an answer on there, it's almost always better than the answers on other sites. With none of the horrible multi-page answers, scribd paper, navigation hell that plagues other sites.

Great idea to branch this into other areas, but I wonder how many dedicated users you'll see like jon skeet when it comes to a parenthood advice website.

I don't use their product but http://palantirtech.com/ makes a data visualization tool and has a good blog about it, with some interesting Java dev tips thrown in. It might be overkill for the data discussed in the article summary, but sounds pretty badass.

One really interesting blog article http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/12/12/vizweek-2008-report/ talks about something called the "VAST Interactive Challenge", which as near as I can tell is a competition for data visualization tools to go head-to-head against each other. (Side note - wouldn't it be cool if more software frameworks/applications had shootouts like this?)

The blog article talks about how they had 30 minutes to train an analyst that had never used Palantir, and then 2 hours for the analyst to explore the data. It's an interesting read, and makes you realize how useful a really good tool like this could be for finding trends in raw data.